Wednesday, October 15, 2008

After hearing of the untimely demise of Mother's Cookies, I thought it would be an appropriate time to show off the Rickey cards that I've collected. For more info on the bankruptcy, dayf posted a blog about it a few days ago.

Rickey was included in quite a few of the A's game day giveaways of sets of Mother's cards. His first card is from the 1984 set (the first time that Mother's produced a set for the A's), and you just gotta love the yellow A's jerseys. The next two cards are from the 1987 set, with the logo card serving as the checklist. The A's hosted the All-Star game in 1987, and the set commemorated Oakland's All-Time all-stars, hence the retro Rickey picture in a 1987 set.

Rickey missed out on being in the set while playing for the Yankees in the late 1980s, but made an appearance once again in every set from 1990-1995. I've always been a fan of the 1991 card, as you don't usually see cards with pictures taken inside the locker room. The 1992 and 1993 set pictures are obviously taken at the same shoot, so Rickey must have missed the 1993 session for some reason.

This isn't actually a complete set of Rickey's Mother's cards, as there's still a few that I'm missing. Rickey was included in the Padres Mother's set in both 1996 and 1997. He was also included in the 1998 A's set (coincidentally, the last set they would produce for the A's), after returning for his last stint with the team. If anyone has any of these three cards, I'd love to work out a trade!

To conclude the post, I'm going to take a detour from Rickey cards, and focus on some of the other Mother's Cookies cards I'd obtained over the years. Unlike the Rickey cards, these were actually included in packs of cookies, at one card per bag. They are also all still sealed in their plastic wrappers, protecting them from the inevitable crumbs of animal cookies. I'm actually glad that Rickey never had a set like this, as I would have eaten a lot of cookies at the time to try and complete one!

The scan starts with two presidents, part of a 42 card set released in 1992. It didn't used to be "cool" to put presidents on baseball, so I guess they were just ahead of their time. The remaining cards (apart from the Nolan Ryan farewell set) were all part of 4 card sets. The Will Clark was released in 1990, McGwire in 1988, Canseco in 1990, Griffey in 1991, and Piazza/Salmon in 1994.

Nolan Ryan was very popular with the people at Mother's, and had quite a few sets produced. The first card is from 1993, and is a 10 card, 10-year farewell set. The final Nolan Ryan is from a 1990 set commemorating his 5,000th strikeout, which was of Rickey Henderson, so we do have a Rickey connection to the second half of this post. I also have a Ryan card from 1991 celebrating reaching 3,000 wins.

I grew up eating Mother's animal cookies, and hope that Mother's is able to work something and return to the market. Although they haven't included baseball cards for a while, when they were included, I couldn't wait to open up the bag, dig to the bottom, and find the card. It's something that I fondly remember from my childhood, and want to thank them for including cards when they did.